Businesses worldwide recognize the commercial value of their data and seek reliable, cost-effective ways to protect the information stored on their computer networks while minimizing impact on productivity. Protecting information is often part of a routine process that is performed within an organization.
A company might back up critical computing systems such as databases, file servers, web servers, and so on as part of a daily, weekly, or monthly maintenance schedule. The company may similarly protect computing systems used by each of its employees, such as those used by an accounting department, marketing department, engineering department, and so forth.
Given the rapidly expanding volume of data under management, companies also continue to seek innovative techniques for managing data growth, in addition to protecting data. For instance, companies often implement migration techniques for moving data to lower cost storage over time and data reduction techniques for reducing redundant data, pruning lower priority data, etc.
Enterprises also increasingly view their stored data as a valuable asset. Along these lines, customers are looking for solutions that not only protect and manage, but also leverage their data. For instance, solutions providing data analysis capabilities, improved data presentation and access features, and the like, are in increasing demand.
In addition, many companies use virtualization techniques for a variety of purposes, such as to reduce the number of physical servers or other computers by instantiating multiple virtual machines on a single physical host computer. The term virtualization in the computing arts can refer to the creation of a virtual instance of an entity (e.g., a hardware platform, operating system, storage device or network resource, etc.) that behaves like a physical instance. For instance, a virtual machine can be a software representation of a physical machine. Virtualization can be used to centralize administrative tasks while improving scalability and workloads, and can be an important tool for maximizing hardware utilization.
Using virtualization techniques, many virtual machines (e.g., hundreds or thousands) can be instantiated on a single host device. The host device can contain significant amounts of memory and computing power in order to execute the virtual machines, which can be referred to as “clients” or “guests”. Although each virtual client can be logically viewed as a standalone device, in actuality the virtual client machines share underlying hardware with the other virtual machines residing on the host.